Ramadan. It’s a time for increased focus on worship, renewing engagement with the Quran, and “…a time of spiritual reflection, improvement and increased devotion and worship,” according to Wikipedia (and it’s not wrong).
As mentioned yesterday, I’m succeeding (so far) in the basic parts of the fast—avoiding food, drink, and marital relations between Fajr and Maghrib (first light and sunset, more or less)—but there’s much more to it than that. Continue reading “Ramadan: a time for…”
I’m having trouble focusing today, having trouble concentrating. It’s just 2 Ramadan, so that’s expected, and at the same time I’m having trouble focusing, I’m also feeling a sense of gentle tranquility, so it’s a wash, I guess. Continue reading “Ramadan: doing it right?”
The blessed guest has arrived once again, all thanks and praise be to Allah for granting us another opportunity to experience its blessings. Continue reading “Ramadan Mubarak!”
David Campany’s book a Handful of Dust is (unbeknownst to me when I purchased it) a catalog that accompanied his exhibition at LE BAL in 2015/16, titled ‘a Handful of Dust: from the Cosmic to the Domestic.’
Would that I had been through Paris during that time, and known about the exhibition: this book is an incredible scholarly and theoretical exegesis and meditation on photography, that takes its starting point from Man Ray’s Dust Breeding, a photograph of Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, aka The Large Glass during its lengthy construction phase, when Duchamp had it laying on a table at the back of his studio, breeding dust, and traveling through the hundred years or so of photography and photography theory since Man Ray opened the shutter on his 4×5 and he and Duchamp went for dinner.
Continue reading “David Campany – ‘a Handful of Dust’”Along with the Diana Mini, the box that arrived from Lomography back in early April also held an LC-A Instant Back+… Fun!
And if you’re confused about exactly what an LC-A Instant Back+ is and what it does (Mom was), after a considerable amount of fiddling about, it replaces the film door on the LC-A with a sort of miniature pack film back that turns it into an Instax Mini with an aperture, scale focus, adjustable ISOs, and all the vignetted, lo-fi goodness that comes with he LC-A.
Fun! Continue reading “the LC-A Instant Back+ and a (re)discovery”
Can a tiny, (almost) all plastic camera with one mechanical shutter speed and two apertures compete with the precision engineered, metal and glass late 1970s consumer grade masterpiece from Nikon?
So after fried pies and Irving Penn and all my wife’s good cooking—MashaAllah, my darling, adorable wife is a magnificent cook—Mom headed back home, I went back to work, and the cameras still had HP5+ hanging out in them.
I burned through the rolls as fast I I could stand to, which wasn’t very fast. Oh well. Continue reading “HP5+ flora”
